


4 times it hurt and 1 time it didn't

by i_need_more_coffee (orphan_account)



Series: steve and reader [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Domestic Fluff, Drinking, F/M, Fluff, Love, Love Confessions, Mutual Pining, Painting, Reader is sassy as hell, Reader-Insert, Tickling, anatomy is a bitch, cursing, fun times lmao, i wrote this after not sleeping for 39 hours, steve is my favourite cinnamon roll, y/n
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-09-23 10:14:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20338456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/i_need_more_coffee
Summary: 4 times "that's why you love me" hurt and 1 time it didn't.steve and reader.





	1. part 1

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments are very much appreciated <3!

“I’ll pay you good money to come to my apartment and shoot me in the head so I don't have to figure out the anatomy of this god damn hand,” Y/N said, her phone balanced in the crook of her neck, ear pressed against her shoulder to keep it there. She briefly let her thoughts linger on the lost romanticism of owning a cordless phone, wishing fleetingly that she had a thick, coiled cord to twirl around her fingers as she chattered on. Did Steve ever miss stuff like that?

“Sounds like a plan,” Steve replied. “Only—It would make my life a lot more difficult if you aren't here to teach me how the microwave works. And knowing your political views, you don’t own a gun.”

“Semantics,” Y/N said, swatting her hand dismissively despite the obvious fact that no one was around to see it. 

“But,” he said, “I can still just keep you company if you’d like.”

“Only if you bring food,” she said.

“Sam made garlic bread,” he offered.

“Ugh,” she moaned. “Key to my heart.”

“Be there in ten.”

Steve used his spare key to let himself into her studio.

“I gave you the spare key for emergencies,” Y/N called from her spot on her bed, laptop in her lap. “Not so you could so rudely let yourself in whenever.”

“If I remember correctly, you gave me your key so that if you missed more than two days of classes in a row, someone would have a way to get in and collect your corpse before it rotted too much,” he said, repeating her old words back to her.

“That is what I said, isn’t it?” she smiled playfully and patted the down comforter next to her, signaling for him come sit.

“Plus,” he said as he shucked off his wet rain jacket, “I need some way to get snacks between missions.”

“ That’s why it always smells like popcorn when I get home,” she said incredulously.

He shrugged his shoulders and gave her his iconic smile. He sat down on the little chair by the side of the bed. Y/N shook her head at him, “Oh come on, drop the manners and get up here” Y/N said as she dragged him up by the arm.

He unwrapped the tin foil packet he brought the garlic bread in and held it out to her. She pulled out a slice from the loaf and bit down. “Sam really is the best cook of all of us. Why do any of the rest of us even try?” she asked.

“I know,” he agreed. “Buck tried making spaghetti tonight but it was futile. Sams bread was the star of the show.”

“Well,” Y/N said around a mouthful of bread, “Anyone’s bread could beat out Buckys spaghetti.”

He laughed at the truth of it. Buck was an awful cook. “I really hope whoever Buck has even an ounce of culinary skill, or the two of them will be doomed forever.”

Y/N nterlaced her fingers and raised her arms overhead, stretching her back. She had pain on her nose and wore oversized grey sweats and an old, faded blue ringer tee which exposed her belly button as she stretched. Steve quickly looked away, careful not to let his thoughts go anywhere off-limits. They were friends. Really good friends. That was it.

That was it.

“So, Steve,” she addressed him, dragging him back to reality as she grabbed a tissue from the box on her nightstand to wipe her greasy fingers. “How the hell does the anatomy of a hand work?”

“Y/N, didn't you just take a class about anatomy?” he said laughing a little.

“Well, Steve,” she stressed his name to make fun of the exasperated way he’d said hers, “all we do in class is look at Trump memes and cry over Bernie Sanders and all that could have been.”

“You know, if you’d gotten my old teacher you’d be able to teach the class yourself by this point,” he said teasingly. 

“Here’s the funny thing though,” she said, throwing the tissue box onto the bed in front of her crisscrossed legs. “You took the class, and you had a good teacher. So, by your logic, shouldn’t you be able to teach this course to me now?”

“You clever little devil,” he said.

“That’s why you love me,” she said. The worst part of it all was that Y/N had no idea what kind of truth she was saying. Steve’s heart ached to tell her, but his head knew better. His head knew they had a good thing going, and there was no sense in potentially ruining that.

He yearned to say something. But instead, he settled further into the bed, grabbing a notebook and a pencil and started his explanation of anatomy.


	2. that's why you love me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> that's why you love me part 2

It was 2 in the morning and on any other night ever, he would have been fast asleep. But he’d watched one too many episodes of some show Sam had insisted he needed to watch, and so now he lay staring at his ceiling contemplating what the robotic apocalypse would look like. At least, that’s what he’d been doing before Y/N had called.  
  
“Hey, you’re drunk, and I need to drive you home,” Y/N said, her vowels thick and her words slurring together into some kind of a mess. He heard her laugh then, almost giggle honestly. “Wait!” she shouted comically loudly. “That’s not what I meant. I meant you’re drunk and I need to drive you home!”  
  
Steve rolled his eyes and threw back his covers. “Just send me your location and don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”  
  
Steve grabbed a grey t-shirt and threw on a pair of sneakers when he got her text. She wasn’t far. If she was sober, Steve knew she would insist upon walking. But she very obviously was very not sober, so he grabbed his keys and climbed into his car.  
  
He heard the booming music in the run-down house from a block away. When he pulled up in front he rolled his window down to see if he could spy her. It was dark, but not dark enough that he couldn’t make out the few bodies milling around outside the party—and Y/N didn’t appear to be one of them.  
  
“Y/N?” he called, craning his neck to see if she’d walked down to the street corner.  
  
He heard her mumble, “‘M right here,” but he still didn’t see her. Until she raised her arm in the air to catch his attention, and he discovered she was lying flat on her back on the grassy lawn.  
  
He turned off the car and climbed out, ready to chastise her. “What are you doing laying in the grass, doll?”  
  
Once he stood over her and saw the glaze in her eyes, she brought a finger to her lips and shushed him. Then she grabbed his hand and pulled him down to the ground next to her. He humored her, just to see what she’d say.  
  
“Look at the stars, Steve.” Her voice was filled with incredulity. “Look at all of them out there. Humans spend too much time with their heads down. There’s a whole beautiful world out there. The stars know me. They know me better than I know myself.”  
  
He would usually laugh at her and dismiss her drunken ramblings. But there was a truer honesty in her voice than he’d heard in a long time. It was a part of Y/N that usually lay dormant and now it sat right here, awake and splayed open and begging for conversation and dear god, he wanted to know this piece of her better.  
  
So he lay with her, even though the grass was damp and a girl was crying on the porch, and another guy may or may not be peeing into a bush at the side of the house. He lay with her and stared at the stars.  
  
“Just look at them and — and feel,” Y/N urged him.  
  
  
He waited for a beat before asking, “So, do we share our feelings, or do we just—”  
  
“Shh,” Y/N said.  
  
So he sat and he felt. At first he felt silly, but eventually, he got out of his head. They lay in silence as Steve sorted through his true feelings about the stars. He’d never paid them too much thought, but now that he was actively dwelling on the subject, he realized how much comfort the stars had always brought him.  
  
The first time he’d ever gotten the stomach flu during training, he’d sat in the bathroom, alternating between throwing up and staring at the starry sky. He’d missed his mother, at that moment, and the stars had alleviated some of that crushing feeling.  
  
The stars felt like home to Steve, he realized.  
  
He turned to Y/N, wanting to share with her, wanting to thank her, for this little exercise. But she was fast asleep.  
  
He stood up quickly, feeling embarrassed and a little annoyed. “Wake up, doll,” he said, toeing her side.  
  
“Five more minutes,” she whined.  
  
“Come on,” he said. “Now. I just laid in the grass and stared at the stars looking dumb while you slept. Now get up.”  
  
Y/N threw her arms up in the air and made crab-like motions with her hands. “Carry me,” she begged.  
  
Steve grabbed her hands with his own and heaved her up. She wasn’t putting any effort into the endeavor, making her body unreasonably heavy, not that it made any difference as Steve lifted Y/N of the ground like she was light as a feather.   
  
He shifted around so he could carry her more comfortably, and proceeded to carry her to the car. He placed her into the passenger seat and leaned over her body to buckle her like she was some kind of toddler.  
  
The seatbelt finally clicked into place after about a thousand tries and Steve patted Y/N’s knee before walking around and clicking his seatbelt on.  
  
When he reached the first intersection, he flipped on his turn signal in the direction of Y/N’s apartment.   
“No!” she shouted abruptly, shocking him so much that he slammed on his brakes. “Not my apartment.”  
  
“What do you mean, ‘not your apartment?’ Where am I supposed to take you?” he asked.  
  
“I don’t know! But I promised my roomie that I wasn’t going to go out and get drunk at some shitty party and if I go back like this they’ll know I’m a liar,” Y/N’s voice dropped to a hissing whisper at the end as if she were telling a horrible secret.  
  
“I’m pretty sure they already knew you were lying,” he said chuckling slightly. He was all bark and no bite though, for he flipped his turn signal the other way and headed back to the tower, drunk Y/N happy in the passenger seat.  
  
It wasn’t a struggle getting her up the stairs since she “didn’t feel like” walking. Once they were safely inside he placed her carefully on his bed.  
  
He brought her a couple of Advil and a tall glass of water and didn’t turn around again until she had drunk it all. When it was gone, he placed the glass on the bedside table and returned to the bed.  
  
“Tuck me in?” she asked, batting her eyelashes like a seventh-grade girl.  
  
He didn’t like to admit it tugged at his heartstrings, and he found herself smiling coyly and bringing the covers up around her. He tucked the blankets closer to her body and ruffled the hair atop her head when he was done.  
  
He turned around and kicked his shoes off, but was pulled back by her voice.  
  
“Steve?” she asked.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Come closer,” she beckoned. “It’s a secret.”  
  
Her eyelids were heavy—each blink lasted a little longer than the last. Sleep would claim her any minute, he could tell.  
  
He leaned down so she could whisper in his ear, but before he turned his head, her face rose up off the pillow just slightly. She pursed her lips and placed the smallest, quickest peck against his lips.  
  
Steve pulled back, touching his lips with the tips of his fingers, reeling. She just smiled widely and closed her eyes, settling her head deeper into her pillow.  
  
It was because she was drunk. She was just messing around, he figured.  
  
He couldn’t let her see how much it affected him.  
  
Steve quickly climbed into his side of the bed and turned the lamp off, hoping to gloss over what, to her, must have been a drunk mistake. But to him, it meant everything.  
  
He prayed she couldn’t hear his thundering heartbeat in the darkness.  
  
“Hey, Steve?” she asked, calling out with a thick voice into the thick darkness.  
  
“Yes, doll?”  
  
“Thanks for picking me up,” she said simply. It hung there, like an unfinished thought.  
  
“You’re a pain in my ass,” he teased in response, trying to ease some of the crushing weight that had so quickly appeared in his heart.  
  
“That’s why you love me and watch your language Steve!” she said. He could hear the smile in her voice just as clearly as he could feel her body heat, right there next to him in the full-sized bed.   
  
He waited until he heard the regular sighs of her deep sleep to whisper into the dark, “If only you knew.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> that's why you love me part 3

“For love the love of God, Steve, will you sit still for one minute?” Y/N snarled, the small brush still hovering above his eyelids. Her own eyes were narrowed and watching him carefully as he squirmed.

“It tickles.” He whined - actually whined. One hundred year old super soldier with america's ass was whining at the sensation of a brush moving against his eyelids. Tinker Bell, indeed.

“Yes, I know.” Y/N replied impatiently. “But you were the one who wanted to do this, remember?”

It was true, Steve had taken one look at the vicious black line that ran along Y/N’s lash line and arched up in a sharp flick at the corner of her eyes and had said that she looked like a cat- or a queen. And then he had politely asked for her to do the same for him.

So, here they were. Y/N on the kitchen counter and Steve in front of her on a barstool.

The others gathered around them and was already dressed in all their glory for the fundraiser they were going to in half an hour. He had taken longer than her to select his clothing and fumbled with his hair for what felt like hours. And now he was causing them to be later still by squirming like an unruly child. 

“Hold. Still.” She told him and cupped his face with her free hand.

Steve let out a slow breath and his shoulders relaxed. “Alright, I’m ready.” He said dramatically.

Y/N placed the brush at the corner of his eye and with a flick of her wrist, pulled the line halfway up, right towards his eyebrows.

“You squirmed less when I pulled Clint's arrow out of your shoulder.” She told him when she moved onto the other eye. Now, the problem was matching this one to the other.

“The pain was expected.” Steve grumbled, eyes dutifully closed. She had chided him three times already to keep them shut.

And then she placed the brush down and drew. It was perfect and Y/N felt immensely proud. Sure, it wasn’t the same as painting or drawing, but it still, it was close enough. And Steve always looked like a work of art to her.

“Can I open my eyes now?” Steve asked.

She looked down to find his eyes still closed. She smiled and whispered, “You can open your eyes now.”

He did. Blinking slowly, as if anticipating pain or discomfort. And then his eyes focussed on her face and he frowned. “Your lipstick is smudged.”

Y/N barely managed to peer at the mirror over his shoulder, when Steve had reached for a tissue and was gently running a folded edge along the corner of her lips.

Then he stood and guided her into the now empty seat. “Let me fix that for you, doll.”

She rolled her eyes even as she chuckled.

Y/N held still, showing him how one was supposed to react when being tended to and he laughed slightly at her.

“How do I look?” Y/N asked, after smacking her lips and rubbing them together until it felt warm and buttery.

“Perfect.” Steve whispered, his eyes shining. "You always do"

"Mmmh, that's why you love me"

Oh if only she knew Steve thought to himself as he admired her in all her beautiful glory.

Y/N grinned up at him, holding his face in her hands. “You look like a cat. Or a god, I suppose.” She said, quoting him.

Steve took a moment to just look Y/N in the eyes and what he felt was-

"Okay love birds, that's enough break it up" said Tony as he walked into the kitchen carrying a bottle of wine that was probably worth more than everything in Y/N's old apartment put together.

Y/N quickly put on a smile as to hide how disappointed she was, turning around reaching for the make up wipes and- where the hell where they? 

She scanned the counter but found nothing, then she noticed that Loki was missing.

A look of realisation settled on everyone's faces and all hell went loose.


	4. part 4

“What if I just like, dropped out of school and worked at a Chick-fil-a until I died?” Y/N asked as they sat in the grass beside the running track. “If things ever got really bad, at least I’d always have the food. I could feed you intel from the inside too, so I could tell you if any bad guys are forgetting the extra sauce”

Steve smiled, liking the idea that they’d be in each other’s lives forever. He’d always believed they would, but it was nice to hear it from her too. It had been weeks, and she still hadn’t mentioned the kiss. Not once. So either she didn’t remember, or she thought it was such a mistake that she hadn’t even mentioned it.

Steve didn’t mention it either, because either way, it wouldn’t mean to her what it meant to him. Nothing ever meant to her what it meant to him. But that was okay. He wasn’t going to be the one to ruin them.

“I mean,” he said, “you totally could. I doubt the fast food industry is a dying industry. But, you’ve made it this far. You may as well get your degree first, and don’t even think about saying that you’re not good enough for that because we both know that’s a lie. You are one of the most intelligent and kind people I've ever met”

Y/N threw her head back against the blanket they laid on and scrubbed her face with her hands. “I just don’t see myself going anywhere after school. Like what is there for me? I could continue working for Stark but the superhero industry is dying and the coffee is bad”  
Steve chuckled lightly and shoved Y/N’s shoulder lightly “ Someone is being a little mean, huh?” he said as he grabbed Y/N’s sides and began to tickle her.

A couple of minutes later when Y/N had won The Great Tickle War, she sighted and leaned back against the wall.

Closing her eyes, she smiled smugly and said, “That’s why you love me.”

And oh, it truly was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reader at the start is me after 2 hours of school.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments are very much appreciated!
> 
> also I'm so sorry for the times that there was a name in the last chapter instead of Y/N I write it with a name there so it's easier to write (I have no idea why) but it's fixed now <3


End file.
